Personal Data, Calendar and More

The May meeting was held on Friday the 11th. We took a look at requesting personal data from Facebook, Google and Apple; iOS Calendar and helped out a member with a slow running iMac.

Personal Data

DaveK had requested the personal data held on him by Facebook and Google, he explained the process with each company (it’s quite simple and can be done on-line from your account in both cases). He then gave us an overview of the data they supplied in response. It was interesting to see what these companies hold (which can be very extensive) and the consensus was that it’s a good idea to do this if you use these and other similar services.

Dave had also requested his data from Apple but their process currently involves a slower manual request via email so he had yet to receive his data.

Here are details of how to request your data from the various companies:

iOS Calendar

Robert gave a demonstration of the iOS Calendar particularly aimed at members new to the app. He showed the various calendar views including opening the useful event details in Month view and how week view can be accessed by rotating the iPhone.

He also showed the settings available for Calendar (within the Settings app) including how to set your default calendar for new events and the option to sync older events (only 1 month’s worth is kept on iOS devices by default).

Slow iMac

A member brought along his iMac that was running very slowly with the spinning wait cursor appearing regularly. This was despite there being nothing obviously unusual in Activity Monitor and no hard disk errors showing when First Aid was run in Disk Utility. We could however hear constant hard disk activity.

After some investigation we found the FileVault background encryption was running and this seemed to be the likely underlying cause. The member is going to repair the hard disk from the recovery partition and then leave the Mac on to see if the encryption eventually completes.